All posts tagged ‘LibraryThing’

I like books and I want my kids to like books. If you are obsessive like me, you may have the urge to catalog those books. Or maybe, in this age of online information consumption, you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to read more books and want to track what you’ve read. Or maybe you want a place where the grandparents can see what books the kids have, so you don’t end up with multiple copies of The Cat in the Hat. Or maybe you want to share your reading habits with your friends.

I explored six sites designed to help you track your book reading and ownership:

Geeks like books and we want our kids to like books. If you are obsessive like me, you have the urge to catalog those books. Or maybe, in this age of online information consumption, you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to read more books this year. Or maybe you want a place where the grandparents can see what books the kids have so you don’t end up with multiple copies of The Cat in the Hat.

There are are several online tools that can help you out. GoodReads, LibraryThing and Shelfari each allow you to catalog your books online and interact with other readers.

I have been an avid user of LibraryThing since 2008. I started using it to catalog my book collection while home on paternity leave. I chose LibraryThing because it allowed me to manually enter books that were not on the site. (Back in 2008, the GoodReads and Shelfari libraries were limited to books listed on Amazon.com and I have about 200 vintage books that are not listed on Amazon.) I have happily been using LibraryThing, with over 1,200 books in my online catalog. LibraryThing has been good to me, so I am hesitant to move. I have also received some books for free through their early reviewer program.

I’m trying read more books this year so I thought it would be a good time to look back at these three sites and evaluate them again.

It wasn’t until a little over a year ago – while discussing the possibility of the term “nerdcore” being applied to music in styles other than just hip-hop – that I realized many of my brothers and sisters still reject the term nerd. “The Wrockers will never go for it,” a friend and fellow music blogger said, “I can’t imagine they’d want to be saddled with the nerd label.” When I inquired as to what word these seemingly nerdy individuals would instead use to describe their studious predilections, his answer was simple: geek.

This seemed to me a counter-intuitive choice, as I have always viewed the terms as practically synonymous. But since that time our community has seen a veritable explosion of what could be termed anti-nerd sentiment, or, perhaps more accurately, the rise of geek apologists. As recently as this summer, fellow GeekDad Matt Blum touted the virtues of the geek, while summarily cataloging the various ineptitudes of the nerd. While I find this strange at best and an outright false dichotomy at worst, many of our fellows tend to agree with Matt. From Wil Wheaton’s (brief) turn as a poster boy for The Society for Geek Advancement to the rise of “geek chic,” geeks seem to have it, while nerds, inexplicably, don’t.

Last month, this simmering geek/nerd animosity took a strange new turn when John Dalton, the Australian sysadmin for social cataloging community LibraryThing shared an oddly incongruous set of clouds harvested from that site’s tagmash feature. When, through the magic of Twitter, his experiment found its way to me, I was both fascinated and perplexed. I followed up, and, thankfully, was able to discuss the subject further outside the constraints of 140 scant characters. Continue Reading “A Nerd or a Geek? It’s All in What You Think!” »